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Article published In:
Journal of Language and Politics
Vol. 17:6 (2018) ► pp.882–906

Political myth as a legitimation strategy

The case of the golden age myth in the discourses of the Third Way

ORCID logo | University of Southampton

Golden age myths as an answer to political crises are a recurrent phenomenon. This article demonstrates how the idea of a past golden age as the answer to a crisis of society was employed in the discourses of the Third Way: At the turn of the 20th century, the Social Democrats (SPD) in Germany and New Labour in Britain employed a golden age myth to define their politics. Analysing a corpus of texts from the Labour Party and the SPD between 1990 and 2005, this article demonstrates how global ideological trends are locally legitimized differently through the use of local political myths. The major contribution to the field of political discourse analysis lies in the discussion of mythopoesis as a legitimatory strategy, as well as in the analysis of the local adaptation of the golden age myth, which draws on Laclau’s discourse theory and its idea of empty signifiers.

Keywords: comparative political discourse analysis, legitimation, political myth, empty signifier, one nation, Soziale Marktwirtschaft, Germany, United Kingdom, New Labour, SPD
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Methodology, corpus and aims
  • 3.Political legitimation and the role of mythopoesis
    • 3.1Argumentative macrostructures of political discourse
    • 3.2The role of mythopoesis in political legitimation
    • 3.3Political myths as empty signifiers
  • 4.Discourse-historical context: Discourses of the Third-Way as social democratic reform discourses
  • 5.Findings and discussion
    • 5.1Argumentative macrostructures of the discourses of the Third Way
    • 5.2The golden age myth as a purposive topos in the discourses of the third way
    • 5.3‘One nation’ and ‘Soziale Marktwirtschaft’ as empty signifiers in national golden age myths
  • 6.Conclusions
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
Published online: 14 December 2018
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https://doi.org/10.1075/jlp.17059.kra
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